When Wendy Perriam describes herself as Surbiton's only living novelist she's not boasting. She's grieving. For she sees Surbiton as a sort of prim suburban prison, where she toils in bleak isolation.

If only she could live in Hampstead, or Chelsea, or one of the London boroughs which artists and writers are said to find so stimulating.

She's wrong, of course. Surbiton has not only sharpened her skills as one of Britain's finest novelists, but been a boon to publicists plugging her powerful flow of titles over the past 17 years.

They never tire of telling the press how astounding it is that such a vividly uninhibited writer lives in such a comically staid environment. And the press, whose notion of Surbiton is rooted in TV sit-coms, never tires of reporting it.

All in all, Wendy and Surbiton need one another - something I've believed since first meeting her for an interview in 1981.

I said then, and have maintained ever since, that she is England's most brilliant, yet most appalling, woman novelist.

The richness, the vitality, often the sheer GENIUS of her prose, is enthralling. But her philosophy and her characters can be.....appalling?

Outrageous?

What IS the word for books where every human mood, from joy to dark depression, and every bodily function, from eating to copulating, is described with a shatteringly sensual impact that leaves you breathless.

It is far removed from porn, or the calculated titillation of most modern fiction. Wendy's raison d'etre is to use her magnificent command of words (a rare talent in semi-literate Britain) to portray life as it REALLY is.

Thus she never writes about anything she has not seen or experienced for herself.

She had a spell in a mental hospital as preparation for one of her novels, and stayed amid the brothels and gambling joints of Las Vegas.

For others she has lived in a convent; sampled vibrators and aphrodisiacs at a sex aid party; stayed in a New Age commune, where residents drank their own urine and danced nude; waded into Bushy Park's Diana Pond at midnight, wearing men's clothes ; and investigated lovemaking in an opera box during a Royal Gala performance. (It could be done at the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera, but not, she found, at Covent Garden!)

Her 13th novel, Second Skin, was published this week by Flamingo at £16.99.

It is lighter and more upbeat than her previous ones, but writing it required a drastic life change.

Leaving her husband in their immaculate period house, 57-year-old Wendy moved into a squalid flat in Camden with three lively twenty-somethings, hung out in seedy pubs and clubs, danced all night at a rave run by a man called Teabag in a micro skirt, got high on hash cake, and ran a stall in Camden Market.

She also adjusted to sleeping in a room hung with full-frontal posters of nude men, and wearing borrowed black leather and jeans instead of her usual Laura Ashley.

"It was a complete culture shock after Surbiton," says Wendy, now safely back home in her own clothes.

"No-one did any washing up or cleaning. The fridge was always empty, and the bath was usually full of dirty clothes.

"It was also incredibly noisy.

"Everyone had music systems in their rooms and played them aggressively all the time. People came and went at all hours, and went to bed and got up when they felt like it."

It sounds like hell, and Wendy admits in some ways it was. But the freedom was seductive.

"Everyone was so friendly and giving and free of the hang-ups that rule life in suburbia," she says.

"It was marvellous to sit around talking without feeling morally bound to cook, clean or care what the neighbours thought."

Catherine, the heroine of her book, feels the same.

After her husband drops dead at their silver wedding party, she embarks on the life lived by Wendy in Camden, and realises that the constraints of parents, marriage, motherhood and middle-class suburbia have prevented her from ever being her true self - a free spirit eager for hedonic adventure.

Wendy believes many people are prevented from being the self they were born to be by family, fear of job loss and many other factors. Certainly, she says, that's true of her.

She was born in an air raid shelter in Twickenham, and deposited at an early age in a strict Catholic boarding school run by nuns.

Their teaching was that life is a vale of tears and one should forego pleasure, mortify the flesh, and aspire to life after death.

This has left her with a permanent feeling of guilt, made worse when she lost her faith at 17, and was expelled by the nuns for heresy.

The conflict between her wild spirit and the discipline instilled by years of religious tyranny is what makes her such a unique mix of contradictions - beautiful yet plain; outgoing yet introspective; lighthearted yet darkly moody.

She can be the best company in the world. She can also be quirky, provocative and downright maddening. But boring - never.

Exactly the same can be said of her books. Indeed, they will surely live on as true literature long after she and the rest of us have gone.

There's something about Surbiton that inspires authors.

In the 19th century the great novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray, chose to write there.

So did Thomas Hardy and Rhoda Broughton - the best-selling woman writer of her day.

In the 20th century Surbiton has been home to, among literary others, Muriel Box, the world-famous screen writer and Britain's first women film director, and Enid Blyton, the children's author par excellence.